The Tarantulas
This is a passage from Thus Spake Zarathustra (Chapter 14 — same title as this post) that resonated with me recently.
It is interesting to think about interactions with people that you either consciously or unconsciously wish to punish for a perceived slight.
Inspired ones they resemble: but it is not the heart that inspireth them—but vengeance. And when they become subtle and cold, it is not spirit, but envy, that maketh them so.
Their jealousy leadeth them also into thinkers’ paths; and this is the sign of their jealousy—they always go too far: so that their fatigue hath at last to go to sleep on the snow.
In all their lamentations soundeth vengeance, in all their eulogies is maleficence; and being judge seemeth to them bliss.
But thus do I counsel you, my friends: distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful!
In the end, these interactions diminish you.
Nietzsche has a recommendation on how to ensure that you don’t fall prey to the above.
It can be found in Chapter 51 (On Passing-By): “Where one can no longer love, there should one—PASS BY!”
Are Dolphins People?
I normally tweet things like this, but I have been reading Thus Spake Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil for what seems the 21th time (they should be read together, I have found) and this post really spoke to me.
From EcoGeek.org
Lori Marino at Emory University is taking a scientific approach to determining how human dolphi[n]s are. She’s simply running them through an MRI and measuring the complexity of their brains. The result, unsurprisingly, is that dolphins are extremely smart. Their brains, according to Emory, are more complex than any other non-human brain, beating out Chimpanzees for the title.
The question that post raises is how this fact should impact the way that treat dolphins and the ethics associated with that.
My question is a little more in depth, as I would love to question the fundamental values that led us to believe that (generally) humans are more valuable than dolphins.
As absurd as it may seem, ask yourself the question, “Why am I more valuable than a dolphin?” and then follow the chain down to your axiomatic values.
You may think that has a simple answer, but under careful scrutiny you end up with a teleological question and those sorts of questions are very hard indeed.
That aside, I think it is wonderful that we are getting some quant that we can use to determine the intelligence of a given non-human species.
The OData Provider Model
WCF Data Services supports two data sources out of the box: an EF data source and a CLR data source.
This lets you expose an OData service from any database that supports EF as well as arbitrary CLR objects.
There are many reasons to need more than this, particularly if your data is not relational or you can’t afford to have CLR types floating around all over the place.
A canoncial example of this scenario is the SharePoint data model.
In order to support SharePoint, we adedd a dynamic data source provider model that we call IDSP internally.
This provider model consists of a number of interfaces that you can use to expose any data source as an OData service.
One of the PMs on the WCF Data Services team, AlexJ, is blogging about this at now.
http://blogs.msdn.com/alexj/archive/2010/01/04/creating-a-data-service-provider-part-1-intro.aspx
Worth checking out…
Best Music of the 2000s
Best Cover of the 2000s: Imagine: A Perfect Circle
I went through iTunes tonight to determine my favorite music of the 2000s.
Based on number of tracks played and ratings, here is what what I found.
Top Albums
- Songs for the Deaf by Queens of the Stone Age (Best track: First It Giveth)
- In Keeping Secrets Of Silent Earth: 3 by Coheed and Cambria (Best track: A Favor House Atlantic)
- FutureSex / LoveSounds by Justin Timberlake (Best track: What Goes Around…/…Comes Around)
- Collision Course by Linkin Park & Jay-Z (Best track: Dirt Off Your Shoulder/Lying From You)
- I Brought You My Bullets You Brought Me Your Love by My Chemical Romance (BT: Skylines and Turnstiles)
- Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge by My Chemical Romance (BT: Thank You for the Venom)
- Stadium Arcadium by Red Hot Chili Peppers (BT: Dani California)
- Morning View by Incubus (BT: Wish You Were Here)
- Renegades by Rage Against the Machine (BT: I’m Housin’)
- Blood Mountain by Mastodon (BT: Blood and Thunder [Live])
Live Album of the 2000s
How the West was Won by Led Zeppelin
Live Single of the 2000s
Bold as Love (Live) by John Mayer
Artist of the 2000s:
My Chemical Romance
Best Cover of the 2000s
Imagine by A Perfect Circle
Imagine there’s no Heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today
Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace
You may say that I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will be as one
Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world
You may say that I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will live as one
Stoic Warriors
I just completed Stoic Warriors.
This book was notable for two reasons.
First, it was the first book at I read on the Kindle device.
I have read several books on the iPhone with the Kindle app, which I enjoy (small screen and all), but the reading experience on the device itself was great, modulo one thing — it needs a backlight for nightime reading.
Second, this is the last book that I will complete this year and it will likely have the most impact of any book in 2009.
In short, the book outlines Stoic philosophy through the lens of the needs of today’s military forces. For example, what does Stoism tells us about anger, grief, loss, etc. — all emotions and feelings that are most manifest in military situations where life and limb hang in the balance.
The book covers basic Stoic philosophical teachings, largely through Cicero and Seneca, but a sizable portion of the work covers ‘applied Stoism’ through military experiences in WWI, WWII, Vietnam and the Gulf Wars.
The book has flaws. The final chapter should have likely kicked off the work as the notion of a human community makes war and its horror much more profound. The points about Buddhism and Stocism should have been explored. I think there was maybe a paragraph on it throughout the whole book — but I think the connection is profound. Lastly, the author seems to be an Aristotlian but doesn’t come out and say it.
I wrote a big wrap-up paragraph here, but the Wordpress iPhone app ate it, so I will close by saying that I recommend the book, especially if you are one that holds (as I do), that practical philosophic inquiry is not about Truth (whatever that is), but about ways of thinking about the world that help us survive and even thrive in a hostile environment.
2009 Top Songs
I just looked at my most played songs that were released in 2009 (not my most played songs of the year).
New Fang: Them Crooked Vultures
Mind Eraser, No Chaser: Them Crooked Vultures
See You: Dinosaur Jr.
Catch & Release: Silversun Pickups
Best I Ever Had: Drake
Panic Switch: Silversun Pickups
Stillborn (Acoustic Version): Black Label Society
Check My Brain: Alice In Chains
Black Gives Way to Blue (Piano Mix): Alice In Chains
Run This Town (feat. Rihanna & Kanye West): Jay-Z
The True King
The true king can walk among his subjects unarmed, unguarded at night, so it is said.
Of this, I am of two minds.
My Romance, the desire for true brotherhood and love of the human family, wishes this to be true.
How long I have wanted such a world!
My Reason tells me that the king would be cut down in seconds.
How long have we lived in such a world and how much longer still?
Now, the real question is which world is best for humanity?
Mao: Problems of War and Strategy
Every Communist must grasp the truth, “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” Our principle is that the Party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party. Yet, having guns, we can create Party organizations, as witness the powerful Party organizations which the Eighth Route Army has created in northern China. We can also create cadres, create schools, create culture, create mass movements. Everything in Yenan has been created by having guns. All things grow out of the barrel of a gun. According to the Marxist theory of the state, the army is the chief component of state power. Whoever wants to seize and retain state power must have a strong army. Some people ridicule us as advocates of the “omnipotence of war”. Yes, we are advocates of the omnipotence of revolutionary war; that is good, not bad, it is Marxist. The guns of the Russian Communist Party created socialism. We shall create a democratic republic. Experience in the class struggle in the era of imperialism teaches us that it is only by the power of the gun that the working class and the laboring masses can defeat the armed bourgeoisie and landlords; in this sense we may say that only with guns can the whole world be transformed. We are advocates of the abolition of war, we do not want war; but war can only be abolished through war, and in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to take up the gun.
OData Update
The (WCF) Data Services team just released the an update to .NET FX 3.5 for the OData.
New features in this release are:
· Projections: This ADO.NET Data Services URI format has been extended to express projections (i.e. you can now work with a subset of the properties of an entity). This release includes both server and client library (including LINQ support) support for projections. We’ve done a fair amount of work in this space to support roundtripping projected values, working with anonymous types, etc. We’ll create a subsequent series of posts to describe this feature.
· Data Binding: The data services client library for the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 has been extended to support two-way data binding.
· Row Count: One scenario we heard a ton of feedback on after shipping V1 of ADO.NET Data Services in the .NET Framework 3.5SP1 is the ability for the a client of a data service to determine the total number of entities in a set without having to retrieve them all. To address this need, we have extended the data services addressing scheme to allow a client to obtain this type of information without having to download all the entities in a set.
· Feed Customization (aka “Web Friendly Feeds”): A common ask we have received is to provide the ability to customize how entities are mapped into the various elements of an AtomPub feed. This feature does just that by providing a data service author declarative control over how the data service runtime maps the properties of an entity (e.g. a Customer, Order, etc) to the elements of a feed.
· Server Driven Paging (SDP): This one is best described by example. If you had a data service that exposes photos, you likely want to limit the total number of photos a single request to the service can retrieve because the total collection of photos may be very large. This feature allows a service author to set per collection limits on the total number of entities returned for each request. In addition to limiting the number of photos returned per request, the server provides the client a “next link” which is simply a URI specifying how to continue retrieving the rest of the entities in the collection not returned by the first request. For those familiar with AtomPub, this feature adds support for AtomPub <link rel=”next” …> elements to the data service runtime.
· Enhanced BLOB Support: This feature enhances the BLOB support provided in V1 to enable data services to stream arbitrarily large BLOBs, store binary content separate from its metadata, easily defer the loading of BLOB content when its metadata is requested, etc.
· Request Pipeline: We have started to expose events throughout the data services server request processing pipeline. For this release we’ll expose request level events and in future we’ll look to expose more fine grained events based on your feedback. The goal of exposing our processing pipeline is to allow services further transparency into a data service such that a service author can do things such as setting HTTP response cache headers, wrapping interceptor processing and data service request processing in a single transaction, etc.
· New “Data Service Provider” Interfaces for Custom Provider Writers: As the data services runtime has evolved, so has the number of ways people want to plug data into the data service framework. In V1, two methods (Entity Framework and arbitrary .NET classes) were supported to enable a data service to interact with various diverse data sources. To address another class of environments and data sources we have introduced a way to write a “custom” provider for those cases when the previous two provider models don’t meet your needs.
Model-Driven Content Based Routing
I tweeted this, but I think it deserves a full post. This a great example that leverages many of the different aspects of SQL Server Modeling (”M”-based DSLs, “M”, Modeling Services, etc.) to enable a better experience around application development/management.
One of the major new WCF features in .NET 4 is the Routing Service which is a configurable WCF-based service that supports content-based routing and protocol bridging. The content based routing capability in .NET 4 allows for WCF to perform message filtering based on content contained in either the SOAP headers or within the message body. For instance, if a company has two different versions of the same service deployed, the client application can call into a central routing service. The routing service can then forward the message to the correct backend service based on information it extracts from the incoming message, such as version number. The routing service also supports error handling routing that can automatically resend the message to another destination endpoint in the event of an error.
Unfortunately, the default routing service is not the easiest to manage or configure. Fortunately, the recently released SQL Server Modeling CTP makes it easy to build model driven application and the .NET 4 router configuration is a good modeling candidate. As such, the RouterManager sample which is available for download from MSDN Code Gallery, shows how this can be accomplished using Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 and the SQL Server Modeling CTP which was released in conjunction with PDC09. This is the first in a series of articles that will cover the architecture and concepts used in the RouterManager sample application to create a fully model driven content based router.
The SQL Server Modeling CTP can be used to create a domain specific language (DSL) that can make the routing configuration of the WCF routing service much simpler. This is accomplished by first defining a language that is human readable, which will provide IT Operations and others within an organization who are not expert developers with an easier way to interact with applications. The CTP’s modeling language features make it easy to define the structure of the configuration data in a human readable representation that can be shared within an application’s modules, tiers and tools or between even between applications. Also included, as part of the CTP, is the SQL Server Modeling Services, which provides functionality to store, access and share both the physical and metadata representation of the model. The Modeling CTP also provides a visual tool called “Quadrant” for viewing and interacting with models and model data.